Page:Penelope's Progress.djvu/265

Rh and paced up and down in front of the sofa. "But in the first place there is the difference in nationality."

"I have no patience with you. One would think he was a Turk, an Esquimau, or a cannibal. He is white, he speaks English, and he believes in the Christian religion. The idea of calling such a man a foreigner!"

"Oh, it didn't prevent me from loving him," she confessed, "but I thought at first it would be unpatriotic to marry him."

"Did you think Columbia could not spare you even as a rare specimen to be used for exhibition purposes?" I asked wickedly.

"You know I am not so conceited as that! No," she continued ingenuously, "I feared that if I accepted him it would look, over here, as if the home supply of husbands were of inferior quality; and then we had such disagreeable discussions at the beginning, I simply could not bear to leave my nice new free country, and ally myself with his æons of tiresome history. But it came to me in the night, a week ago, that after all I should hate a man who didn't love his fatherland; and in the illumination of that new idea Ronald's character assumed a different outline in my mind. How could he love America when he had never seen it? How could I convince him that American women are the most charming in the world in any better way than by